After an emergency dematerialisation, the TARDIS lands in a weird white
void. Drawn out of the time machine, the Doctor, Jamie and Zoe find
themselves in a surreal world where imagination has become reality,
populated with characters out of folklore and literature. And the
mysterious overlord of this Land of Fiction desires the Doctor's
company... forever.

Production

Peter Ling had started writing while in the army during World War II, and
honed his craft while spending two years recovering from tuberculosis.
Success on radio led to him becoming a script editor and Head of
Children's Series for Associated-Rediffusion. Ling later cocreated the
soap opera Compact and wrote for programmes such as The
Avengers before he devised a new soap opera, Crossroads.

Amongst the writers on Crossroads were Doctor Who story
editor Derrick Sherwin and his assistant, Terrance Dicks. Just prior to
taking up their jobs on Doctor Who in late 1967, they were
travelling by train with Ling when the latter remarked on the way soap
opera characters are treated like real people by some fans. Sherwin
suggested that this might form the basis of a Doctor Who story and
shortly thereafter, Ling put together a proposal called “The Fact Of
Fiction”.

It was Derrick Sherwin's idea that Lemuel Gulliver should
speak only in the words Jonathan Swift wrote for him

On the basis of this submission, Ling was commissioned to pen an outline
for a six-part story, now entitled “Man Power”, on December
20th. Early in the new year, its length was truncated to four episodes;
the title also underwent a slight change to “Manpower”
(although this would be applied inconsistently). Ling was now aware that
Victoria would no longer be the Doctor's companion by the time his serial
entered production, and so with little information on her replacement yet
made available, he chose to call the female companion in his storyline
“Zoe”. Sherwin and producer Peter Bryant liked this name, and
with Ling's permission it was ultimately adopted for the new
character.

In Ling's original version of episode one, the TARDIS broke up after
passing through a magnetic storm. The Master's footsoldiers were
monstrous, faceless entities and it was they who posed puzzles to the
Doctor. Sherwin suggested that these creatures should in fact look like
life-sized toy soldiers, but wanted to hold off their onscreen appearance
until the end of the episode. Instead, he posited that children could ask
the Doctor the riddles; Ling thought of the juvenile heroes of Edith
Nesbit's novels, such as 1899's The Story Of The Treasure Seekers,
in revising these scenes. It was also Sherwin's idea that Lemuel Gulliver
(from Jonathan Swift's 1726 book Gulliver's Travels) should speak
only in the words Swift wrote for him. The story editor further asked Ling
to include scenes of the TARDIS crew coming under mental assault prior to
the time machine malfunctioning.

The four scripts for “Manpower” were commissioned on January
31st, 1968. Assigned the production code Serial UU, it was intended that
“Manpower” would be the last story made as part of Doctor
Who's fifth recording block. For the central figure of the Master,
Ling drew inspiration from Charles Hamilton, who had created the
children's character Billy Bunter under the pseudonym Frank Richards.
Ling continued to make use of a variety of literary characters in writing
his scripts. These included Rapunzel, a heroine from European folklore
popularised in the Grimm's Fairy Tales (1812-1815) published by
Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm; the unicorn, the Minotaur and Medusa of Greek
myth; Sir Lancelot, a popular character in the legends of King Arthur; and
D'Artagnan, from the 1844 work Les Trois Mosquetaires (The Three
Musketeers) by Alexandre Dumas.

Peter Ling hoped to use the vigilante Zorro, but this was
vetoed for copyright reasons

In addition, two historical figures appeared: seventeenth-century French
satirist Savinien Cyrano de Bergerac, whom Edmond Rostand portrayed as a
romantic poet in his 1897 play Cyrano de Bergerac, and the
eighteenth-century pirate Blackbeard, whose real name was Edward Teach (or
Thatch). In the Karkus, Ling sought to lampoon the comic book character
Batman, created by Bob Kane in 1939, whose popularity was soaring thanks
to a campy live-action TV series. Ling's scripts also referenced a variety
of other texts, such as the 1883 Robert Louis Stevenson novel Treasure
Island and Louisa May Alcott's Little Women (1869). Ling hoped
to use the vigilante Zorro, created in 1919 by Johnston McCulley, but this
was vetoed for copyright reasons. A quotation from Walter de la Mare's
1912 poem The Listeners seems to have been excised due to similar
concerns.

As Ling wrote his scripts, problems arose with the preceding serial, The Dominators, culminating in that story's
reduction from six episodes to five. It was decided around March 29th to
append the extra episode to the start of “Manpower”. On April
7th, Sherwin was granted permission to write the new part one (Ling's four
scripts now becoming episodes two through five); a formal commission
followed on April 19th. Sherwin composed his script with the intention
that the only sets necessary would be the TARDIS console room and a white
void. Meanwhile, the lone supporting characters appearing would be the
White Robots, the costumes for which had already been used on The
Prophet, a 1966 episode of the anthology series Out Of The
Unknown, and which would only need to be repainted. Sherwin also took
the opportunity to have The Dominators lead
directly into “Manpower” to explain how the time travellers
end up in the Land of Fiction; Ling's “magnetic storm” idea
was therefore no longer necessary.

On April 22nd, the serial gained its final title of The Mind
Robber. Exactly one month later, on May 22nd, it was decided to cut
the episodes from the normal Doctor Who length of about 25 minutes
down to roughly 20 minutes apiece, resulting in a number of minor cuts
throughout the five installments.

The horse provided to play the unicorn had a light brown
coat, so white blanco had to be hastily applied

The director assigned to The Mind Robber was David Maloney, who had
been a production assistant on several Doctor Who stories between
The Rescue and The
Ark. After completing the BBC's internal directors' course in
early 1968, Maloney had worked on Z Cars. A single day of location
filming took place on June 9th, beginning at Harrison's Rocks at
Groombridge in East Sussex for the material set on the Citadel cliff face.
Frazer Hines was joined by his cousin, Ian, who played one of the Toy
Soldiers. That night, the unicorn scene was recorded at the Kenley
Aerodrome in Surrey. Unfortunately, the horse provided had a light brown
coat rather than white, and so white blanco from a nearby air force base
had to be hastily applied to the animal.

June 10th and 11th were given over to model filming at the Television
Centre Puppet Theatre. Three days at the Ealing Television Film Studios
then followed from the 12th to the 14th (a fourth day had been scheduled
for the 17th and then moved to the 7th before being cancelled
altogether). Material completed at this time included the scenes set in
the white and black voids, and the climactic battle between the
fictional characters.

As was now the norm for Doctor Who, studio recording for each
episode took place on successive Fridays, starting on June 21st.
Unfortunately, during the week between the taping of the first two
installments at Television Centre Studio 3, Frazer Hines contracted
chicken pox from his nephews and was therefore unavailable for part two.
Thinking quickly, Sherwin rewrote the scripts for episodes two and three
so that the Doctor incorrectly put Jamie's face back together while
attempting to solve one of the puzzles. Hamish Wilson was cast as the
altered Jamie. To avoid having to use the plain set again the following
week, the first few scenes of episode three were recorded on June 28th as
well.

Hines rejoined the production the next week, when the venue switched for
two episodes to Lime Grove D. July 19th, however, saw cast and crew return
to TC3. This day began with the taping of Hines' material from part two.
Subsequently, episode five was recorded on 35mm film instead of videotape.
This brought an end to both the production of The Mind Robber and
Doctor Who's fifth recording block as a whole; Serial UU would be
held over to start Season Six in late summer along with The Dominators.

The Mind Robber was the only Doctor Who story written by
Ling. Upon its completion, he discussed another idea with Terrance Dicks,
about a land where time ran backward, but this was ultimately abandoned
due to its complexity. In the mid-Eighties, Ling and Hazel Adair
collaborated on “Hex”, about the queen of the bee-like
Hexagorians kidnapping British scientists, but script editor Eric Saward
was unhappy with the proposal and it never made it onto the schedule.
Ling subsequently published several novels. He died on September 14th,
2006.